In Los Angeles Coders Are Too Scared To Take Risks | Hacker News Reader

In Los Angeles Coders Are Too Scared To Take Risks

codebelay.com

39 pointsbarce28 comments

As an LA resident engineer myself, my theory (backed by an extensive amount of no facts whatsoever), is that engineers are more likely to "end up" in LA than to deliberately move there.

Almost every coworker I have had is in LA because they needed to move closer to family due to illness, they moved there because their girlfriend/wife is in some grad school program at UCLA, their girlfriend/wife is trying the acting/performing thing for awhile, etc. Engineers in situations like those don't have much flexibility in taking much under market rates and basic perks (namely health insurance).

Also, as Paul Graham said in one of his essays, Los Angeles' identity is "you should be famous," and unfortunately, software engineering isn't known for breeding famous people outside of our TechCrunch echo chamber. In the Bay Area, founding a successful startup makes you a rock star. In Los Angeles, just about the only thing you can do to be a rock star is to be a rock star.

Interesting that you should mention that. I've been thinking about ways lately to make software developers more famous - as I think the work that we do is as creative and difficult as the work done by actors, musicians, etc.

Most of my thinking has focused on how to get the general public to actually think about the developers behind all of the software they already use. This may not work for something massive like Google search, but for applications developed by small teams (mobile ones especially), I believe there's a lot of opportunity to grant the individual some notoriety (if they want it, of course).

I would want to start with influencers - existing celebrities. Celebrities often tweet when they love (or don't love) an app that they just started using on their mobile phones. I wonder how hard it would be to enable them (and more importantly incentivize them) to shout out to the individual developers of the app in these tweets.

Note that all this takes place in an optimistic framework where Hollywood is meritocratic and fame is earned. I know it's not so in a lot of cases, but I still think an opportunity exists for developers who create compelling, popular apps to receive some personal recognition.

I've been trying to do good photographs of startup entrepreneurs in their environments (office, walking in the Bay Area, etc.) The purpose is to have a story that's more focused on the person rather than strictly the business. I kind of thought about this after meeting the guys at Bump many many months ago and thinking how cool they were but no one who ever used the application would ever really know.

Candid photos like this one I took: http://www.flickr.com/photos/love_in_a_trashcan/5236986603/i...

The only thing that's stopping me is the fact I don't personally know that many devs doing startups in SV because I'm usually holed up designing and developing.

Another problem is that there is no "Category Killer" company which can incubate tech focused entrepreneurs like there is in SV. In SV there are companies liek Paypal, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. who attract top engineering talent. Had there been a category killer company produced in Socal I think there'd be a much different tech landscape.

I don't know about Paypal and Facebook, but interestingly enough, both Google and Yahoo have/had fair-sized offices in Southern California, though Yahoo's has gone the way of all Yahoo.

This is about right. Silicon Valley has a strong support network for entrepreneurs, the best funding environment in the world, and plenty of great large companies that look positively on startup experience. So the personal risk involved in joining a startup is low: you might miss out on opportunity cost and lose savings while in the startup, but the future career risk is nil. This isn't true in most of the country.

but the future career risk is nil

I think that is the biggest part. In SV and other good startup scenes its very well known and understood that startup experience is looked upon positively.

So even if your startup blows up you can always get a great job at Xcorp afterwards

As a counterexample, I moved to Southern California specifically to run a startup. There were many reasons, but talent acquisition was never one of them.

Interesting enough, though, we have been discussing the possibility of moving to Nevada for shipping logistics and taxation reasons. As before, talent acquisition is very low on the list of considerations.

This fits my feeling that one aspect of the disparity is that tech personnel in So Cal startups aren't offered as good a compensation terms, that lowers the population willing to take the startup risk because the potential payoff is generally lower.

One theory is that coders from L.A., such as myself, who want to work for a startup move to the Bay Area. This would inflate the number of risk takers in the Bay Area and deflating that number in L.A.

Another point to look at is that while many companies in the Bay Area are 'engineer-driven' many of the tech jobs in L.A. simply exist within other industries such as entertainment.

Sorry, I fat-thumbed and downvoted you instead of upvoting.

This article is so full of such silly generalizations I'm not even sure where to begin, or whether i should.

"I did an informal survey of different Los Angeles based Information technology companies. One common theme: although espousing a culture of innovation, and although some are very profitable, most are simply not cutting edge, and some are very behind the times."

An informal survey of LA start ups.. awesome. Any word on how exactly you went about conducting said survey? My guess is it was based on recalling random techcrunch articles read over the past couple years, but please correct if I'm wrong. LA has a ton of start ups that have all kinds of products, working environments and compensation levels, most of which I would guess the author never heard of.

"In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually created."

So basically, no one needs to know js and css/html anymore because they are all magically generated by some server side fairies. So facebook, twitter and google do not have people who specialize in js or css/html because that's just way too simple. Totally. For a product the size of what MySpace had, I think it would be shockingly incompetent to not have people who would specialize in that tech.

"Another Los Angeles great, eHarmony.com, uses 40 to 50 engineers for its matchmaking algorithm and servers, whereas OKCupid.com uses only 10."

In your survey, did you happen to ask them why they had such a discrepancy? Because i'm pretty sure it's not because eHarmony's employees are 5 times dumber than okCupid's. There could be a ton of reasons why these numbers are what they are besides lack of skill.

Anyway, I think this is an attempt to rationalize some failure the author has experienced at his previous job. But frankly I think this was a pretty bad attempt at generalizing something as big as the LA and SF job markets. Start ups exist everywhere and come in all shapes forms and sizes, LA has lots of them. To say that an entire city's worth of start ups is one way or another because of myspace, eharmony and your last work place is just way too simple. Anecdotally, I have friends in several LA start ups that are doing just fine, have working environments as good as their peers in SF, if not better, and are using the same range of technology people in SF use.

I worked in the LA area (aka "Southern California") for 4.5 years in three different companies in three different industries--image restoration/movie post production, network test and measurement, and finance. FWIW during that time I also interviewed in Silicon Valley and got job offers in the Bay Area, but elected to stay in SoCal. I recently left the US primarily for family reasons and the farcical US immigration system.

It's true that there isn't the same concentration of high-tech companies in SoCal compared to Silicon Valley, but then it's a much bigger place in terms of population. In the Hollywood area (e.g., Burbank, Glendale, Studio City etc.) there's a ton of animation and post-production shops that develop a lot of software. If you're a system administrator you can run some of the largest render farms in the world.

If you're into computer graphics, whether it's image processing for post-production or 3D for animations and games, SoCal is probably the center of your universe. E.g., the technology to shoot 3D movies like Avatar was largely developed in SoCal.

Further west in the San Fernando valley and Calabasas there's a healthy cluster of mid-sized world-class companies like DataDirect Networks, Ixia, DTS and Fulcrum Microsystems.

Further south in Orange County and San Diego there's a bunch of companies like RED, Blizzard, Broadcom and Qualcomm.

Suffice it to say that there's a lot of very good high-tech work being done in Southern California!

Silicon Valley Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, e.g. Apple, Intel, financial software which would total 387,000): 49,900
Los Angeles Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, financial software which would total 758,000): 106,100

Despite having a smaller pool of talent, Silicon Valley tech workers’ companies are able to produce 1% of the GDP of the United States or $174 billion annually.

I don't understand this analysis.

1) why exclude a large portion of the Silicon Valley workforce - because their hardware/financial jobs aren't "startup-y" enough?

2) Where does this GDP/earnings estimate come from, and if it is for SV companies as a whole, isn't it likely to include a whole heck of a lot of employees at these companies that do not work in SV? Apple, Google, etc employ lots of people across the globe.

In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually created.

What is the point being made here? That MySpace was not as advanced because some of their job listings did not include SQL? Or because they have some job listings for front-end web work? It takes a huge jump in logic to assume that a job listing for "HTML/CSS" means web pages are "manually created". And since when is an entire city defined by a single company's job listings?

This entire post is full of shoddy analysis and conjecture. I don't understand people that think you can sum up all of the people within a given geographic area with a few words ("scared", "not taking advantage of innovations in automation").

This kind of post has been covered here on HN many times before. There isn't any coder shortage anywhere that increasing pay scale can't solve. LA startups don't pay what SV companies do. Until that changes, they will always be second-tier (actually third-tier, if you count NYC).

I live in LA, and I wholeheartedly agree. The compensation and offerings of many LA-area startups leave much to be desired and is the only reason why I'd be more than glad to look at SF/SV-area startups over LA-based ones. If I'm going to take a risk at a startup and I'm not even going to be compensated well for it, I may as well do my own thing. Which is exactly what I'm doing right now.

The cultural issues LA has is a whole different matter, but I think it's one that's easily solved if you just know your way around the small pockets and niche communities in the area. I think it's mostly the size and travel inconvenience that makes LA a different beast from SV. The better part of the greater LA area encompasses land mass that is far larger than the SF Bay Area in its entirety.

Coders in LA might not join startups to the same extent they do in SF, but you can't get to 'scared' from that.

I've talked to a number of developers here in NYC, primarily in the finance industry, who have no interest in joining a startup. It's not because they're scared - they simply aren't interested.

Perhaps developers in LA are the same way. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, and that's absolutely fine.

Having lived in both LA & SF, and been involved with the dev communities in each, I'd agree with you. The original article just assumes that the goal of every developer is to work for a startup.

You move to SF/SV to work for either a startup or one of the web giants. That's our dream. It's our Hollywood. Those are the types of people you want working on startups.

Developers who don't have this mindset are much more likely to just be cozy with their well-paying 9-5 gigs working for one of the many media/entertainment companies in LA. There's nothing wrong with that, it's good that they have priorities in life other than work. Those aren't the types that you want running your startup though, and they aren't the people who are attracted to the startup-life. It's not that they are scared, it just isn't appealing.

Another factor could be that the presence of the entertainment industry means there's another huge, highly entrepreneurial game in town. I remember Kathy Sierra's post about the "hollywood model", where you always get fired at the end of a project because that's what happens when a project ends. Your job security is 100% a function of your reputation and body of work.

While successful and creative software companies don't (necessarily) "end" the same way a film or album might, I have noticed a similar pattern among a lot of the creative workers in the bay area startup scene. I wouldn't call it "job hopping", since these folks typically stick around long enough to see the project through, but they won't stick around to maintain a project either. They will leave to find something in a more creative growth phase.

The film industry does provide for this kind of career (including in high tech)... and actually, it's pretty difficult to get "credit" for your work as a programmer (I suspect that this frustration alone contributed substantially to the rise of open source projects), whereas if you work on the tech side of a film in a meaningful role, your name will appear in the credits.

LA coders may actually be taking on a greater risk when they join a startup. SV programmers (even "old" one with families) see so much opportunity in the startup scene that they aren't concerned about the availability of jobs should the startup tank. In many ways, they gain career stability through cutting edge work and the wide network they can build through startups. In LA, maybe the critical mass just isn't there (or at least not to the same degree)? LA coders may just be reponding to different risk/rewards.

Yes! As an 'old' programmer with a family, I thought long and hard before leaving a stable job and joining a startup. In the end I decided that it was worth it even if I had to find a new job in two years and ended up somewhere that just 'paid the bills'.

In my limited experience, it seems like finding a good startup job in LA depends a lot on your network - e.g. you worked with so-and-so here and they're doing something new and think of you, where my perception of SF/SV is that awesome startup jobs are so plentiful you can't help but have one.

I hope, "SQL" is a typo here.

I hope "a major scripting language" is part of the enumeration of technologies that "coders know". Not a description of SQL.

Yes. Thanks. My fault.

Could it be more of a community or environmental thing than some inherent quality of the coders in LA? For example, up here in SV startups are everywhere, and you can't go anywhere without bumping into someone who works at a startup or major tech company. It's in the air. So it's a lot more likely that an engineer has a friend who sold their company for millions of dollars or who made a bunch of money working for a company like Google. Or maybe all of their friends are working at startups right now. This kind of stuff makes startup life seem a lot more viable, like "yeah, I'm just as good as them - I could do that." I imagine this concentration is much harder to come by in LA.

I think Mark Suster is on the right track with a program like Launchpad LA - bring a bunch of entrepreneurs in together and create that community around startups and risk-taking.

LA is a rough place to do start-ups but thankfully better than Phoenix where I am now. After the bubble burst the heart kind of went out of LA. Also some companies sucked so much life out of people that they stopped trying.

Could you elaborate on why it's a rough place to do start-ups?

la doesn't have much startups

in silicon valley, if you wet your feets in startups and it fail, you go to another.

in la you go back to a huge corp. with a tainted resume for leaving previous huge corp in the past for a startup.

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